Iain Sinclair

Ackroyd is better as a novelist than biographer I think, apart from the amazing London: the Biography.

London Orbital was pretty boring

I like it for this reason. It's just like the M25 in that way. I really enjoy reading him but he's plain wrong about a lot of things. But I don't think it matters and I don't think even he believes half the stuff he says - it's just put out there. His increasingly apocalyptic tone (something he shares with Jeremy Clarkson's latest rantings) I find irritating though.

Also Ackroyd's one on the Thames looks pretty good (from what I've read in Borders). Lots of "magical" stuff though.

The companion film to London Orbital is good too, also hypnotically boring and repetitive.

Isn't it possible to see the occult elements in Sinclair as a less outrageous but no less self-aware attempt to satirise and attack the establishment? Magico Marxism, as Alistair Bonnett has dubbed it. Stewart Home/LPA pamphlets about Royal Family blood rites and what not? This kind of stuff turns up in The Invisibles and From Hell. Sinclair's more sober, but no less mischievous take is well represented in the MI6/Archer chapter of Lights Out.
Reading Rodinsky's Room at the moment, which is absolutely fascinating. I'm not actually a Londoner, but I know Brick Lane and Whitechapel a little, so perhaps it has more resonance for me for that reason? Or is it just that the story is so absorbing in its own right?

lol Stewart Home

I found Rodinsky's Room fascinating too, and I've only passed through the area once. It's quite different in feel to his other books. I think working with Rachel Lichtenstein pulled Sinclair out of his usual routines, always bringing him back to face the sad facts of the story. (Don't get me wrong, I love Sinclair's schtick, and was delighted with his cameo as Norton, Prisoner of London, in the latest LoEG.)

And, yes, Stewart Home has often made me laugh out loud.

just read that guardian thing which was fair enough

The department store of Bentalls in Kingston upon Thames is a "baroque reef": a nice image, until you encounter, 100 pages further on, "reef-buildings . . . in a sea of concrete" and then, 100 pages after that, "a reef of fabulous stadiums".

then i was re-reading a bit of LoFTT, and strike me down: 'This cruciform reef of shops...' is right there on p. 15

it's your letters

^^ one for the 90s heads

Just started on "White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings". It seems good so far

Picked up American Smoke which is Iain doing the Beats and Black Mountain. I was really curious to see how he brought his apocalyptic geographic history lesson thing to us in the godless west. Digging it so far, I kind of think of it as Lovecraft writes for Travel & Leisure mag.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n21/iain-sinclair/diary

A piece on the 70x70 film screenings. Have to say if I was more in London during weekdays I would've fancied my chances at being the only attendee at some of those screenings. I really like going across London to catch a screening of something I want to see, as well as the trip too.

I think he writes so well about that kind of decay except a smugness has been set for a long-time so maybe I should re-visit -- its been a long-time since I read Downriver, maybe I should revisit to see whether it was ever any good. I suppose the work begins for me at examining the nostalgia for um technicolor garbage.

I also wonder if old London cinema going ever inspired connection making that he describes taking place through screenings of the The Clock?